Modern
34 philosophers
Sartre
Existence precedes essence: we are born first, then we define ourselves. Turned down the N...
Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus: we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Won the Nobel Prize at 44, the secon...
Rawls
A Theory of Justice is the most important work of political philosophy since Mill. The vei...
Ayn Rand
Fled Soviet Russia and developed a philosophy of radical individualism. Atlas Shrugged is ...
Foucault
Discipline and Punish opens with a graphic description of a drawing and quartering. Power ...
Derrida
Invented deconstruction, a method of reading that reveals hidden contradictions. There is ...
Habermas
The leading living philosopher of the Frankfurt School. Communicative action theory: ratio...
Adorno
Co-wrote The Authoritarian Personality identifying traits of fascist susceptibility. Fled ...
Beauvoir
The Second Sex is the foundational text of modern feminism. One is not born, but rather be...
Singer
Animal Liberation launched the modern animal rights movement. Effective altruism: donate t...
Chomsky
Revolutionized linguistics with the theory of universal grammar. Manufacturing Consent arg...
Popper
Falsifiability: a theory is scientific only if it can be proven wrong. The Open Society an...
Kuhn
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the most cited academic book of the 20th centur...
Feyerabend
Against Method argues there is no scientific method. Anything goes is his most quoted phra...
Nozick
Anarchy, State, and Utopia is the libertarian response to Rawls. The experience machine th...
Arendt
The Banality of Evil from her coverage of the Eichmann trial is her most controversial ide...
Merleau-Ponty
The Phenomenology of Perception is the foundational text of embodied cognition. Argued tha...
Simone Weil
Refused to eat more than the rations of the unemployed out of solidarity. Worked in a Rena...
Baudrillard
Simulacra and Simulation argues reality has been replaced by symbols and signs. The Gulf W...
Lacan
The unconscious is structured like a language. His notorious Seminar lasted 27 years. The ...
W.V.O. Quine
Two Dogmas of Empiricism demolished the analytic and synthetic distinction. To be is to be...
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Truth and Method founded philosophical hermeneutics. Understanding is always interpretatio...
Emmanuel Levinas
Placed ethics before ontology as first philosophy. The face of the other makes an infinite...
Gilles Deleuze
Philosophy is the creation of concepts. Difference and Repetition is his metaphysical summ...
Jean-Francois Lyotard
The Postmodern Condition defined postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives. Grand...
Richard Rorty
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature dismantled the idea of mind as a mirror of reality. Ar...
Elizabeth Anscombe
Modern Moral Philosophy ignited the revival of virtue ethics. Attacked the theory that mor...
Philippa Foot
Invented the trolley problem in a 1967 paper. Natural Goodness rooted ethics in facts abou...
Frantz Fanon
The Wretched of the Earth analyzed the psychology and violence of colonization. Black Skin...
Kwasi Wiredu
The leading voice of conceptual decolonization in African thought. Showed that Akan philos...
Enrique Dussel
A founder of liberation philosophy. Dates modernity from 1492 and centers the conquest of ...
Judith Butler
Gender Trouble argued that gender is performative, an act repeated until it appears natura...
Thomas Nagel
What is it like to be a bat revived the mind body problem. Subjective experience seems to ...
Isaiah Berlin
The Hedgehog and the Fox contrasts one big idea with many small ones. Distinguished negati...